Support for Israel is Strong, But….
The majority of Americans are strong supporters of Israel in its new war. That support isn’t unanimous, however. Those pro-Palestine protesters (say that three times fast) that you see on the news are a vocal minority, but they are a minority.
Incidentally, an incident this week at the Democratic National Committee shows that a lot of the anti-Israel sentiment that comes from the left isn’t exactly Democrat. On Wednesday, about 150 protesters became violent and illegally blocked access to the DNC headquarters in Washington. This underscores the fact that leftists are not united on the Gaza issue.
This decline may also correspond with a similar decline in support for Ukraine. In the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there was strong bipartisan support for aid to the beleaguered Ukrainian military. Now, almost two years later, support has softened, especially among Republicans who were subjected to a MAGA propaganda blitz by Tucker Carlson and others that depicted the Ukrainian government as racist and corrupt.
Other than the relative sizes of the combatants, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are remarkably similar in many respects:
Unprovoked aggression ✓
Indiscriminate targeting of civilian noncombatants ✓
Torture and murder of innocents ✓
Kidnapping of civilians ✓
Rape ✓
Attempts to use propaganda to blame the victims ✓
I think that there is a direct parallel between the softening of support for Ukraine on the right and for Israel on the left. While I see both wars as separate fronts in a single fight against the current iteration of the Axis of Evil, both fringes bring their preconceptions about politics into consideration.
On the right, there is a combination of admiration for Vladimir Putin and a resentment of President Zelensky for not kowtowing to The Former Guy’s demands for dirt on Joe Biden. Ironically, this undercuts MAGA claims of Ukrainian corruption, but don’t confuse them with the facts.
On the left, some progressives have long sympathized with Palestinians against the Israeli government. This anti-Semitism masked as anti-colonialism has lurked under the surface for years as Jewish liberals and pro-Palestinian factions of the Democratic Party enjoyed an uneasy truce.
I do believe that the Hamas propaganda against Israel takes a page from Russia’s playbook in Ukraine. Or maybe it’s vice versa. Either way, in both cases the aggressor is undermining support for aiding a democracy with pot-calling-kettle-black attacks that amount to nothing more than an attempt to blame the victim. Unfairly, I might add.
I’ll be the first to admit that neither Ukraine nor Israel is perfect. They are, however, much better than their antagonists. It’s not even close and that does matter.
The horseshoe theory comes into play as both the right and the left grow concerned that the US will be sucked into a wider war in either or both cases. While nominal supporters of Ukraine and Israel don’t mind sharing aid and intelligence with their favored country, there is widespread opposition and anxiety to the thought that the longer each war continues, the more likely it becomes that American soldiers, sailors, and airmen will be called upon to fight.
For the record, I don’t think that any serious person wants the US to go to war over either Ukraine or Israel. What’s more, I don’t think that there is a need to do so. Both countries seem more than capable of fighting their own battles, although Ukraine, facing a much larger foe, has a legitimate need for arms, ammunition, and other supplies. In Israel’s case, the aggressor was a smaller and weaker quasi-state, and Israel has a well-developed defense industry, unlike Ukraine, which at the outset of the invasion was equipped predominantly with weapons systems that originated with the invader.
There is the possibility that not standing against the aggression will cause a wider war as well. Vladimir Putin has shown his intention to rebuild the Russian empire, and Iran leads much of the Arab world in a desire to exterminate Jews “from the river to the sea.” Projecting weakness to people like these, or the Chinese, is not a path to peace.
One of the big differences between the two is that so far, the leftist resistance to Israel is not as powerful as the rightist resistance to Ukraine. That may be just a matter of time. Remember that it took time to convince Republicans that Ukraine aid was a bad idea. The Hamas-sympathizing factions on the left have barely begun their propaganda war. Gallup polling shows that it took about a year for Republican resistance to Ukraine aid to rise by about 20 points.
It may also be Republicans who drive a similar resistance to Israeli aid. The YouGov poll shows that it is Republicans who are most likely to believe that the Gaza war will lead to a wider war, one that might involve US troops.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that MAGA Republicans have become relatively anti-war, unless of course, it’s a war that Donald Trump wants to start and lead. In my travels around the interwebs, MAGA Republicans often sound a lot like the peacenik left when they rant about the military industrical complex and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton being warmongers. Even Donald Trump called Hezbollah “very smart” and criticized Iraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortly after the October 7 attacks, similar to his praise for Putin the days after the Ukraine invasion. There’s the horseshoe theory in acton again.
To some extent the process has already started. Candace Owens, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tucker Carlson, all popular figures on the MAGA right, have all expressed skepticism about US support for Israel, much as they did about Ukraine.
There is also the fact that the right is notoriously conspiracy minded these days. As National Review editor Jay Nordlinger said on the platform formerly known as Twitter earlier this week, “Conspiracy theorists can go a good hour, hour and a half, before getting to the Jews. But eventually…”
“Movements that are prone to conspiracy theories are never Jew-friendly for long. History is pretty clear on this,” he added.
Nordlinger’s post was apparently in response to an Elon Musk comment on a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter that claimed Jews “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Musk called the charge the “absolute truth.” In the ensuing mess, Musk dug himself deeper and eventually alleged that the Anti-Defamation League “push[ed] de facto anti-white racism.”
Recent polling shows that support for Israel has already begun to drop as the war heats up and news of Palestinian casualties trickles in. Conventional wisdom holds that it is young Americans who are most sympathetic to the Palestinians, but a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that support for Israel has also fallen sharply among older Americans as well both Democrats and Republicans, although support remains higher among Republicans.
It seems likely that eventually freedom-loving Americans will have to fight to aid Israel just as we are already having to fight to keep the supply lines open to Ukraine. The best way to do that in both cases is going to be the same way that we avoided the government shutdown: Bipartisan consensus. As long as the aggressor-friendly factions in both parties stay relatively small, a coalition of most of one party and a sizable chunk of the other should be able to circumvent the filibuster and hopefully even outmaneuver an unfriendly House Speaker.
Often, things that are worth doing aren’t easy. And our part is easy compared to the Israelis and Ukrainians who are being called upon to risk their lives and face the bullets, bombs, and missiles. They are the ones doing the fighting, bleeding, and dying.
Our part is to continue our legacy as the Arsenal of Democracy. We shouldn’t allow apologists for authoritarians and terrorist groups to distract us from our duty.
It strikes me that support for Palestine is likely to be somewhere around its peak and is hobbled by the children screaming stuff about rivers and seas and whatnot. The die-ins on bridges ain’t helping much either.
Supporters of Israel need to worry about the whole “why is this our problem?” question. “Why should we keep giving Israel technology? Why should we keep giving them bombs? I understand that a country’s gotta do what a country’s gotta do after a music festival gets attacked. I just don’t understand why we have to give them the bullets to do it with.”
If policies are going to change, they’re not going to change because enough people finally threw enough paint on enough storefronts. It’ll be because enough people asked their congresspeople “why in the hell are we involved in this?”Report
It’s easy enough to sell carrier battle groups as deterrents to keep Other Actors in the area from deciding this is a good time to try something.
(Not that they couldn’t do damage, but it wouldn’t come cheap, is the idea.)Report
I used to think that cultural affinity or what the neocons used to cynically call ‘common values’ were about the most overrated thing in the world when it came to foreign policy. Maybe they still are. But I have started to think there might be something to having it as a sort of baseline for an enduring alliance.
At a certain point, people understand that the British, and the French (as annoying as people may find the later) have bled in trenches with Americans a bunch of times when it really counted. Pop history is enough for people to understand that it might on balance be better to have the Germans and the Japanese squeamish and tied up in alliances we lead rather than out doing their own thing. And hey we also get cars and other toys and cultural products we like from them. Even better that none of those countries are out doing things on the regular that complicate our lives as a major world power or cause the average American to think too hard about the point of the relationship(s).
The worst thing that could happen for Israel with respect to America isn’t hysterical rhetoric from the most extreme left wing Palestinian activists. The worst thing that could happen is people start to see them as just another brutal sectarian state in the ME. We can and do have relationships, including uncomfortably close ones at times, with places like that, but they’re tolerated for transactional reasons (historically that being energy). But there are no such transactions of any importance going on with Israel. Without an obvious quo for the quid pro people will be ready to wash their hands, just like they do with Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia if they could.Report
Yeah. What’s going to change the balance is not “support for Palestine”.
It’s “Why are we all-in with *THESE* guys? What’s the upside?”Report
Off the top of my head, America or really the West/world in general gets the following from Israel:
1. A lot more and better access to the Holy Land than they would under an Islamic or even typical Arab Republic Palestine.
2. Israel is responsible for a lot of innovations in science and technology like drip irrigation, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Israel
The world would be a considerably power place without Israel. Now people might not know this but that doesn’t change the fact of it.Report
2. Israel is responsible for a lot of innovations in science and technology like drip irrigation, etc.
As true as this is, and it is very, very, true, I was still a(n old) teenager when I first learned about drip irrigation ad some other agricultural technologies that had been developed in Israel.
I am 61 years old now. Drip irrigations sounds like “what have you done for us, recently,?”
True that there are lots of IT technologies recently developed in Israel. Very few of them are known by the general public. Some of them being kept on the lowdown on purpose.
TL/DR, The average person probably has zero awareness of your Item 2, and given how popular vacations in Jordan or Egypt are, I doubt they will be ready to go to battle for better access to vacations in the Holy Land.Report
“I am 61 years old now. Drip irrigations sounds like “what have you done for us, recently,?”
Do you like Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman?Report
And you have to like them *MORE* than you like Gigi or Bella Hadid.Report
I had to Google Gal Gadot (I had her mixed up with Gad Elmaleh.See the “I’m 61” bit), so I’d have to say I don’t like her (she’s pretty to look at, but can’t judge her talent).
Natalie Portman, who I agree is a great actress, came to fame in the early 90s, so, though more recent than drip irrigation, is not something new.
Talking about great middle aged actresses, I also think greatly of Hiram Abbass (you saw her in Succession). Does she count as a point for “The world would be a considerable poorer place without Palestinians “?Report
As an aside, Yossi and Jagger is my favorite Israeli movie 😁. We can talk about Yehuda Levi if you wantReport
one of the constant sources of amusement to me is the conservative belief that since the crazy Right has coopted the GOP, the crazy left must have coopted the Democratic Party. Were that actually the ace we’d have single payer and UBI by now.Report
The Crazy Right is a bloc. The Crazy Left is approximately 3500 different groups and they hate each other about as much as they hate the Democrats (let alone the Republicans (let alone the Right)).Report
I don’t know that “crazy” is a bloc. I’d say that the right consists of maybe half a dozen constituencies, and within each of those there are people at different frustration (or jerk) levels.
Let’s see: generic Reagan types, free market / libertarian internationalists, 2A’s, nationalists, and social conservatives. The internationalist and nationalist are the only ones who really conflict in ideology, and they’re both very online. Also, the most frustrated people of all groups are very online. So it’s not surprising that a polite social conservative could get the Speakership, because there’s no one opposed to him.Report
The crazy left coopted the Democratic Party in 1972. Clinton was the aberration, not the triumph.Report
Want to know how we get abortion as a right nationwide? This is how we get abortion as a right nationwide.Report
Freddie’s got a great essay about that.
Revealed preferences, baby.Report
Its more than just abortion though.
If you want to persuade normal people that the Republican party is the party of Archie Bunker, comments like this are a great start.Report
Eh, I’m more of the opinion that people are more enamored with “throwing the bums out” and any given election should not be seen as an endorsement of the winner but as a rebuke of the loser. Since 2008 at the absolute latest.
So it’s not that this or that party is spectacularly good at jogging. They’re not going to outrun the bear! But they don’t have to. They just have to outrun the other party.
So you can persuade normal people that the Republican party is the party of Archie Bunker. That’s great.
What archetype do they think the Democratic party is the party of?
It strikes me that when the archetype is “Getting back to normal after a period of insanity”, they do pretty good.Report
If only we had actual empirical examples to study.Report
Well, there’s 2008, there’s 2016, and now we’ve got 2020.
3 is an *EXCEPTIONALLY* small number, though.
I think that one of the things that benefits the Dems is that the whole “moderation” thing when the country is swinging left looks different.
“Vote for me! I am not crazy like the 20 year olds! I am the version of leftism that you found comfortable when you were 35!”
And that “feels” moderate and it’s only boosted by the 20-somethings screaming that your preferred candidate is a literal Nazi and if you prefer a literal Nazi then you’re a literal Nazi too.Report
When yone of the two parties posts stuff saying “Elon. Kanye. Trump” and two of those guys go on social media and tell the entire world, “Hey yeah, we are totally Na.zis!” and the third one start raving about crushing the vermin, then do you think the 20 year old still is the one looking silly?Report
I’m beginning to suspect that you haven’t yet had it sink in what “multiculturalism” means *IN PRACTICE*.
It means that you’re going to be living among people whose culture does not make sense to you and who do not share your priors.
Report
I think you aren’t grasping what all this Azi-Nay “Crush the vermin” stuff sounds like to normal people.
Like, at this point Democratic attack ads are just us quoting Republicans verbatim.Report
Yeah, you guys are doing great.
Now let me just take a big sip of this water and look at the polls…Report
Weird how you always talk about the polls, but not about the actual results of the last few election.Report
That would mean making concessions to Democrats and winemoms having a point. Jaybird would probably rather were a shock collar for the rest of rest life than do that.Report
They *DO* have points!
It’s just that they aren’t the only entities in the solar system that have points!
“Hurray! We won 52 percent to 48 percent!!! THAT MEANS THAT WE’RE 100 PERCENT RIGHT!!!!” is *NOT* a correct opinion!Report
Out of curiosity, who or what are you consulting to determine what “normal people” think?Report
In my definition, “Normal” people think Azi-Nay and “Crush the vermin” kind of talk is horrible. Just as “Normal” people are repulsed by the idea that slaughtering children is some sort of brave act of liberation.
Now don’t get me wrong- I think there is a distressingly large number of Americans who hear “Jews are controlling the world and we need to crush them like vermin” and think, “Hmm, that sounds about right to me!”
So there is a terrifyingly good likelihood that the 2026 State Of The Union address will resemble a Nuremburg rally.
But it isn’t normal by the standards of American history, at least as we’ve known it since 1945.Report
While the loudest anti-Semites in the United States might be on the Right, there is plenty of Jew-hatred on the other side of the aisle. Remember that the women’s march disintegrated because a good portion of the leadership believed in all honesty that Jews bear special responsibility for everything bad that happened to Black and Brown people.
It should be possible to fight against all forms an once but apparently it isn’t. Each side has lots of anti-Semites that they are sympathetic to and they get to pee on the Jews forever.Report
Universalism has unfortunately come to be passé.Report
Universalism was never a majority belief and everybody who protests Israel as an ethnic state is utterly fine with de facto ethnic states, Muslim theocracies in the sense of at least believing nothing could be done about them if not somehow seeing them as different than IsraelReport
No, Lee, the US was founded on Lockean concepts like universalism and it can work just fine in a country like this one, even if the same is probably not realistic for old world ethnostates. The problem you keep bringing up is your frustration with the failure of either American left wing identitarian or American conservative cultural hegemonic value systems to designate Jews as having some sort of special, elevated status.
What I keep (unsuccessfully) trying to tell you is that the problem isn’t the lack of special status, it’s the concept of special status to begin with. If we say some group or several groups are special all we do is set the stage for endless battles over who is special-er and more deserving of special treatment, whether it’s particular racial minorities and the latest gender identity discovered on tumblr last week or real Americans in the mid west watching Fox News and stocking up on gold coins and concealed carry permits. The obvious conclusion of your own complaints about where Jews end up in either system is that the way of looking at things is a dead end, not that Jews are unfairly being denied special status.
And before someone jumps in with the in group out group stuff all I can say is do the required reading. A lot has happened over the last 400 years that undermines the idea that we are eternally doomed to being either the cave men of the hill or the cave men of the valley in a perpetual state of irresolvable conflict.Report
I agree that the Founders had Lockean concepts of universalism. One of the big tensions in American politics is that many of the citizens did not though. Plenty of ordinary Americans saw the United States as essentially a country for White Protestants and acted on such. It’s why America ended up with a big Catholic school system. The local public schools were de facto Protestant schools until the mid-20th century in many places. There is also the long history of American racism against non-Whites.Report
That’s very true, but it’s also pretty clear to me which side has had the better of that argument. It’s important to keep winning it, not concede the basic principles, just because some of the counter arguments come from a well meaning place.Report
This is the flip side of how weird it strikes me that Americans make a colonialism argument; European complaints framed around hostility to ethnic states are weird coming from countries that are ethnic states, or at least relatively recently were founded as such. Many European states (as well as Near East states) were founded/originated from the same partition of empires as Israel (Ottoman, Austro-Hungary and Russia) for fairly similar reasons and historical contingencies.Report
I agree that bigotry of all sorts is completely bipartisan and is found in almost every corner of our society.
I think there is a vast difference in the leadership of our two parties on how they are addressing bigotry with one rejecting it and the other embracing it.Report
I agree with the last segment. I do feel that large swathes of liberals and leftists are very uncomfortable when dealing with anti-Semitism when it isn’t coming from white people though. They always seem to hem and haw about it. have been sounding the alarm on Kanye’s anti-Semitism for about five years before everybody else noticed. When it became really difficult not to notice, the language used was a lot more cautious than they would for other bigots.
Even when the anti-Semitism is coming from white supremacists, it seems to be used more as prop rather than treated as a serious problem like other types of bigotry or racism. It is very hard to get people to take anti-Semitism as seriously as other forms of hatred.Report
The two war have another similarity in that the propaganda is aimed at painting it as a battle of heroes and villains, and ignoring the basic concepts of human rights.
Israel and Ukraine, like all nations, can be credibly accused of corruption and other bad behavior. They also have an undiminished right to sovereign borders and self-determination.Report
On the other blog, somebody pointed out that people did to have a very dualistic view of Israel vs. Palestine. I suspect that a lot of people place the pressure on Israel to do something to end the conflict, beyond Israel being seen in the wrong and/or more powerful, is that people expect that Israel can act while the Palestinian and to an extent the rest of the Muslim majority countries can’t or won’t act for a variety of reasons.Report
The Israeli position that their opponents need to pay the Israeli’s, in concessions and promises, in order to get the Israeli’s to stop destroying their own state remains one of the most baffling positions the Israeli’s hold. The Israeli’s opponents… well… oppose Israel. If giving Israel those concessions means Israel stops destroying itself then the decision makes itself.Report
I think wanting the Palestinians to at least enter into a cold peace isn’t exactly outrageous. On a broader level, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world and nobody seems to have any interest in doing anything about it while screaming bloody murder at the Jews and placing all agency on good Jewish-Muslim relations on Jews.Report
I think wanting the Palestinians to at least enter into a cold peace isn’t exactly outrageous.
But, like, if you’re doing stupid, self-destructive shit, waiting for your adversaries to behave better before you stop is nuts.Report
The violence against Israel is coming from the place where Israel withdrew from in 2005. I am really struggling to understand how the settlements in the WB are causing Hamas to attack Israel from Gaza, especially since there charter states that they consider Tel Aviv to be a pox on Islamic Palestine.Report
The occupation of the West Bank is a poison that is eating Israel alive both internally and internationally. The attack by Hamas originated in Gaza, agreed, but Israel was vulnerable to said attack because Bibi had refocused the IDF and intelligence services on defending the settlements in the West Bank.
If you interrogate left wing opponents of Israel the occupation of the territories remains just about the only subject where they have a substantive point that has any hope of appealing to a broader audience. Likewise when you ask any young person about why their opinion of the state of Israel is so poor the occupation of the West Bank is one of the first and best things they’ll bring up.
Heck, the original sin of Hamas itself as an organization was propped up by the Israeli right as a means of dividing Palestinian leadership and, again, making it easier for Israel to hold onto the West Bank.
On every axis, in every category, when you drill down on the matter you find the occupation of the West Bank festering like an infected wound and either contributing to or causing almost every serious problem Israel faces today. Every long term threat Israel faces, domestically or internationally, has its roots in and draws its sustenance from the occupation of the West Bank.
And yet the Israelis say ‘It’d be a lot of trouble to extricate ourselves from the West Bank so please give us something in exchange for us extricating ourselves so it’s easier for us to do so.”
And then they’re “surprised” when their foes, who wish them ill, refuse to give them what they’re asking for.Report
I mean, yes, but it’s actually way worse than that. Israel knows very well what they’re asking for is literally not possible, there are far too many groups that oppose them and they operate independently each other and there’s literally no way to demand some sort of peace _before_ anything.
And Israel has a long history of both immediately provoking such entities whenever it looks like things have quieted down and then taking the response to that to the extreme, causing the entire process to fail. Check out the immediately attacks on Islamic Jihad in the West Bank right after they let Gaza go, which resulted in Islamic Jihad attack Israel from both the West Bank and Gaza, which then justified Israel’s firing at Gaza. ‘Whoops. Peace broken.’
And the reason this is happening, is that Israel, politically, literally cannot give up the West Bank. Or, at least, the people who have been in charge of Israel cannot do that.
It’s like Republicans announcing they will allow everyone to have abortions at all times if and only if the left goes without a protest getting violent for 5 years. That is not how politics work, and that is the thing that is not actually under control of anyone in the political sphere anyway, and really easy to game.
Moreover, it’s worth pointing out that Israel has never actually promised this, like they use violence as an excuse not to do it but they have never come forward and said that it would happen, if X.
And that’s just talking about withdrawal from the West Bank, not removing settlements, and not not making new settlements. That’s something that can’t even be justified by Palestinian violence (if anything, that’s a reason not to do it!), and yet keeps happening. Because, politically, that’s how the party in power remains in power.Report
Little to nothing that Israel has done in the West Bank since it fell into their hands has been particularly justifiable. Where I would disagree with you is your assertion that Israel is literally incapable of extricating itself from the West Bank. Sharon demonstrated in 2005 that Israel is capable of withdrawing from occupied territories (an act the Israeli right has frantically been trying to make impossible ever since) in a literal sense. Withdrawing from the territories is possible- it’d just be very difficult politically.
That the Israeli’s have made it very difficult for themselves to withdraw is not, however, any real defense of the occupation. If I steal a watch and you and the cops demand it back and I say “Well I’ve duct taped this watch to my arm with, like a hundred yards of tape and it’d take every hair and a lot of my surface skin off my arm to remove it and I don’t want to endure that pain!” you and the cops would be less than moved by my plight.
There really are only three outcomes in regards to Israel. Either the Israeli’s withdraw and the Palestinians get a state (the 2-state outcome); the Israeli’s remain and the Palestinians all become Israeli citizens (the 1 state outcome) or else Israel becomes an illiberal state either via active ethnic cleansing or some formal apartheid regime (I lump these together as a third option simple because both are illiberal, just to differing degrees).Report
That’s why I amended it to ‘the people who have been in charge of Israel cannot do that’.
Israel could, hypothetically do that. It’s a much more difficult proposition than the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip is microscopic and contains absolutely nothing of importance. The West Bank is not and does.
But _Likud_ cannot do that. (Or, rather, won’t.)
I…am not sure we should be pretending that has not already happened, at least to some minor extent. Why are we pretending settlements _aren’t_ a formal apartheid regime? Or forcing a million people to leave their homes so you can flatten them not ethnic cleansing?
We’re just pretending it’s not those things because it’s not happening ‘in Israel’, but I am unsure as to why that should matter.Report
I do have to slightly quibble with this, though, as a lot of Israel’s problems actually date back to the original ‘force Palestinians off their land and seize it for themselves’ that happened in 1948.
However, that has been long enough ago that it probably would not be relevant anymore. It’s what started all the wars in the 50s and 60s, but it is not the 50s and 60s anymore.
…except that Israel has been doing the exact same thing in a much smaller scale since 1968. You don’t forget the horrifically bad and harmful thing that people did to you when they continue to do exactly the same thing, even if at a much smaller scale, for literally all time.
“Why haven’t you forgiven Tim for that time he stabbed you with an icepick. Yes he stabbed you very badly, but that was literally four decades ago, can you not get past that?”
“I mean, maybe I could if he had apologized, and if every year for the past twenty years he hadn’t stabbed me with a toothpick every time he saw me.”
“It’s just a toothpick, it doesn’t even break the skin!”
“I feel there’s some matter of principle here.”Report
Sure, the more activist left and Arabs in general have deeper and fundamental beefs with the literal founding of the state of Israel, no doubt. That being stipulated, Israel does not depend on the good will of either of those groups for its continued existence or prosperity. If Israel was out of the territories those complaints would remain extant but their salience to the great masses of voters in the developed world would be relatively marginal. There simply is zero material constituency capable of forcing Israel to undo 1948 or anything close to it and, absent the occupation of the West Bank, there’s little realistic prospect of one arising in the foreseeable future.
With Israel in the West Bank, however, the trend lines are not ambiguous and they are not favorable to the Israeli project. If Israel stays in the West Bank the best case scenario is some kind of international movement arises that eventually forces it to adopt a liberal one state solution that would likely end Israel’s status as a Jewish state. The worst-case scenario is either endless violence or Israel mutating into some hideous illiberal Jewish fundamentalist state. A Jewish Tehran on the Levant so to speak.Report
My point isn’t really about the amount of people who have a problem with the founding of israel, my point was how Israel continuing to take territory from Palestinians, forcibly removing them and replacing them with Jews, means the original grievance cannot ever die, because it is still actively being done.
I.e, the festering wound isn’t the West bank, the festering wound is what happened in 1948 that has never been allowed to heal because of illegal settlements by Israel.
It’s like every year or so, Congress would vote to take small sections of Indian reservations to remove native Americans from and replace with white people. I sort of suspect that what the US did to them, decades ago, would be a good deal less forgiven by them.Report
Yes, the active settlement activity in the West Bank is a very slow motion ethnic cleansing operation and there’s really no way to defend it.Report
OT actually had a discussion here a while ago about a person who burned her own Harry Potter books and published that on tiktok, and I pointed out burning your own book actually isn’t bad thing, it’s burning other people’s book. But everyone kept pointing out how it was very symbolic and looked really really bad.
Symbolism matters, right?
So, OTers, I want you to imagine that, historically, you are part of a group of people that got forced out of their home at gunpoint in 1948, with people from a country called Israel taking your property and land and everything. With some of your group ending up living in refugee camps for decades.
And then I want you to imagine that via international law about occupying force, Israel ends up in control of your country in 1967, and starts immeditely doing literally the same thing again, just at a much smaller scale.
This isn’t just stealing land, this is stealing land in an exact recreation of a very specific cultural horror that happened to you 20 years earlier.
And it happens continually, for the next 45 years. Just try to imagine yourself as someone in that universe.
And then I want you to think about how in the US we think of it as a minor thing for Israel to be doing, a vague complaint about how they are breaking the law, some sort of vague border thing that’s going to be figured out later.Report
I am really struggling to understand how the settlements in the WB are causing Hamas to attack Israel from Gaza,
They sure as hell didn’t stop Hamas from attacking Israel from Gaza, so if the best argument for continuing to expand them is that stopping won’t prevent Hamas attacks… well, that’s no argument at all.Report
This sounds like take a big risk and whether you get Hamas in control of the WB or not doesn’t matter.Report
It’s extremely unclear why settlements are necessary to keep Hamas from taking control of the West Bank.
The decision to expand and encourage settlements in the West Bank came after decades of Hamas not, in fact, controlling the West Bank.Report
I would answer with a simple question Lee.
Imagine you had a bomb belted to your chest, ticking away, that you had strapped there in the past for various somewhat defensible reasons that are now defunct.
Would it be rational for you to demand that specific people, who you know hate you and wish you ill, pay you to remove said bomb? Would it be rational for you to refuse to remove said bomb until the payment you demand is given to you by those people?Report
Yeah, my opinion on Israel overall is not terribly positive. Once the topic turns to its conduct with regards to Gaza and the West Bank, it’s extremely negative, and that a lot of what they do is essentially criminal.
But none of that changes my belief that no state could, or should, tolerate a terrorist gang slaughtering over a thousand of its citizens and kidnapping hundreds more. I don’t think it’s terribly hard, or even hard at all, to reconcile the two, but evidently it causes a lot of trouble for others.Report
Right, as I mentioned here before France has inarguably done everything that Israel is accused of doing, and worse.
That didn’t stop us from going to war to defend it.Report
For whatever reason a lot of people want to turn Israel into “the most EVIL state that ever existed” and believe that whatever atrocity that Israel has done is worse than anything else taken to ELEVEN. Therefore, Israel has no right to defend itself against Hamas. I wonder why that is but I suspect that a three letter word beginning with J and ending in W might be behind this.
A lot of people can’t seem to resist applying the American/Western lens to the conflict so it the entire I/P conflict because an issue of white vs. non-white with the Israeli Jews in the role of vile white people and the Palestinian in the role of virtuous colonized indigenous people of color. Since anti-Semitism already challenges the systematic definition of racism, people just prefer to go against Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular than challenge their notions.Report
Some of us, meanwhile, are looking at the actions of both sides, and see a occupying force that is extremely obviously attempt to steal land, that the _current_ government’s statement is that ‘the prime minister will work towards the formulation and promotion of a policy whereby sovereignty is applied to Judea and Samaria’, aka, literally steal the entire West Bank. (And, to be clear, I’m not just nutpicking statements, Likud says this sort of things ALL THE TIME.)
It’s straight up fascism, and it’s rather astonishing the level of propaganda and misinformation that Americans have been fed to not see it. Likud _straight up say they are taking all of Palestine_, they have taken as much as they can at almost every point they have been able to. There is no indication whatsoever that they are willing to allow the Palestinians to have _any_ of what they think is ‘Israel’, aka, every inch of the land between the Jordan and the sea. This isn’t confusing, this isn’t a debate, it is something that almost every single action of Israel under Likud confirms, and it is something they have said quite publicly _locally_, if somehow that doesn’t make it to American media.
Hell, the one supposedly ‘good’ thing, freeing Gaza, was quite obviously done to _break the peace process_, because the peace process required Israel to do things that they could no longer do within Gaza…or keep any control at all, which allowed Hamas to take over.
And we also see, countering that fascism, quite a lot of Palestinians. Some of them, like Hamas, are deranged religious fanatics, some of them are proxies for other nations, like Islamic Jihad. Some of them, like Fatah, seem less insane, even if some of their tactics are less than ‘acceptable’ in war…but laws or wars are written by the big nations and they have a tendency to try to outlaw tactics that resistances use.
But here’s the thing about resistance movements: Just because some people use unacceptable tactics doesn’t mean the movements are wrong, and it certainly doesn’t mean the _goal_ is wrong. You can’t invalidate the entire thing and say ‘Those people deserve what is happening to them’ because some of the people on their side harm innocent people.
It’s weird I know, to actually judge the situation not by _who_ the people are, but by what the people in charge of various things are doing and the situation they have caused. Israel has caused this situation, literally from top to bottom, at every point Israel could have stopped doing the most evil and stupidest thing imaginable, but insane religious fanatics hijacked the Zionism movement back in the 1920s, demanded not just a safe place for Jews but to be _in charge_ of it, and never let it go, and they have dragged Judaism along for the ride(1). Hamas, meanwhile, exists almost entirely because it _needs_ to exist for Israel to do what it is doing.
1) I’m not Jewish, I can’t really say what is good or bad for Judaism, but I see a hell of a lot of Jews pointing out how horrifically stupid and dangerous Zionism has been that it is absurd that for how something that has a goal of creating a place to keep Jews ‘safe’ it appears to be actively directly endangering Jews, at literally every point in its history, both inside and outside of Israel, and I don’t see anything wrong with their logic.Report
My most charitable answer is that people can’t reconcile the two because Hamas is so entrenched in Gaza that they can’t see any way for Israel to root at Hamas without doing a lot of damage to innocent Palestinians in Gaza. My uncharitable response is they consider Jewish life cheap and believe that Jews need to take it on the chin because while Hamas might slaughter a thousand Jews here and there and kidnap several hundred including literal babies, the life of all the Jews in the entire world is worthless than one Palestinian to them.Report
Napoleon once remarked “to the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing” in how Jewish emancipation was supposed to play out. Jews get emancipated but the former communal structure will be forever destroyed. Instead Jews will now be a bunch of atomistic individuals that happen to have a similar identity. When dealing with a lot of critics of Israel, I have a strong suspicion that many of them don’t exactly see Jewish identity as being communal as they would see Palestinian identity, Muslim identity, LGBT identity, or African-American identity. This means that Jews have no communal needs while the other groups do.Report
Re: Candace Owens, she’s yet another example of Ben Shapiro’s ability to surround himself with people who somehow manage to make Ben Shapiro look good by comparison.Report
Also, Musk needs to get Xitter to start banning Nazis again, if only to protect himself from agreeing with them publicly.Report
But…then Elon himself wouldn’t be able to walk in the door!Report
Musk would be doing himself an even bigger favor, then.
But Twitter destroyed Musk’s brain, and now he’s hellbent on letting his brain return the favor.Report
Forget it Pillsy, it’s Pinkytown.Report
I think our Lee has been talking about the same thing as the controversial tweet, and for more than the last few weeks.Report
Lee has been talking about how Jews are “pushing dialectical hatred against white people”?
Huh, doesn’t really sound like him.Report
Then you’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Both Lee and this tweet are discussing how a lot of American Jews have participated in lefty activism but have never been accepted as victims. The tweeter is likely looking at that with schadenfreude, while Lee has moved from frustration before the attack to alienation since the attack.Report
And Hamas is just talking about housing policy in Tel AvivReport
The tweet in question:
Okay.
Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest **** now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
I don’t know who the guy is who posted it, and he seems like a jerk. To the first sentence, I’m not sure if you can call the current woke stuff dialectical. It has its roots in Marxism, but it doesn’t even have the virtue of being dialectical. It seeks domination, not synthesis. At least the Marxist can attempt to justify evil in the name of utopia. This stuff is just the boot and the fire.
As to the second sentence, I’m in disagreement. I very much care about Team Enlightenment and I love it when anyone joins. It’s hard to switch sides, particularly when there are objectionable people on the team you know you should join. I think a lot of American Jews are starting to come to terms with the idea that the left won’t just betray them personally, but betray the idea of rights. The tweeter is wrong to single out the new entrants to our country though.
[note: this replaces the version in moderation]Report
There are two places where I think you are misreading the Tweet in ways that make it vastly more benign than it is.
The first, I’ll grant, is a matter of interpretation, where I (and many others) see a lot of allusions to common anti-semitic conspiracy theories where Jews as a group are attempting to weaken or destroy the white race using “cultural Marxism” (hence the reference to specifically “dialectical” hatred) and “flood” majority white countries with non-white immigrants as part of the plot.
If you think this is too tenuous, I think the conversation would ordinarily end here, as we’d have no choice but to agree to disagree about the author’s intent.
Here, however, your reading goes a step further:
To the first sentence, I’m not sure if you can call the current woke stuff dialectical.
Likewise here:
I think a lot of American Jews are starting to come to terms with the idea that the left won’t just betray them personally, but betray the idea of rights.
The tweet’s author does nothing to single out “woke”, liberal, leftist, or even American Jews. He talks about “Jewish communities” and “western [sic] Jewish populations” without any of the qualifications that would support your reading or, you know, make the tweet anything but rancid anti-semitism.
Just the plain words there, without any allusions to common and well-publicized elements of the worst anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing, are extremely bad, and something Musk should never have endorsed.Report
It strains credibility that the journalistic and Democratic left is using this moment to impartially check for a speck in a neighbor’s eye.Report
With all the anti-semitic outbursts we’ve been seeing on the Left recently, I suppose it’s a good time to let the Right have some too, as a treat.Report
So this is what all the fuss is about? I really don’t understand how anyone gets to “antisemitism” from this.
Granted that the tweeter generalizes progressivism to “Jews” as a category — but people on all sides generalize majority-held political beliefs to categories of people all the time. There’s nothing actually insulting to Jews about this comment — the statement is basically “you got in bed with the lefties, now you’re seeing the consequences”. I would think liberals would focus on how it’s insulting to *minorities*.Report
As the resident anti-woke liberal here I have to jump in and say I think pillsy is dead on about this. Now I don’t really give a crap about the Musk connection. If he destroys twitter as a medium (even if inadvertently) and the EV revolution that he demonstrated could be done kicks off, the good he has done for humanity will far outweigh any damage done by his insufferable persona.
But the bottom line is that it is wrong to generalize Jews in this manner, in the same way it’s wrong to generalize any creed or ethnic group. There isn’t even the fig leaf of a poll suggesting that Jews are mostly or all supportive of the politics the tweeter is saying have come home to roost to their detriment. And it does go to the larger issue, that every extremist political persuasion has an evil Jew character, be it the stereotype of the communist professor corrupting impressionable youth with evil ideas to be unleashed on society held by portions of the right, to the conspiring capitlist war monger as a manipilator of people to death and destruction on the left. And also now on the right.
Anyway making excuses for this sort of thing is exactly the wrong way to combat the sort of left wing politics at issue. Jews are individuals with their own positions, interests, and views, not some monolithic fifth column. If it pisses you off (the way it pisses me off) when some woke fool goes off on another unfalsifiable, conspiratorial lecture about white people and white supremacy and ‘whiteness’ well, this kind of crap about Jews should piss you off too.Report
I think this is just a third-rail issue that causes people to over-react. First, you and Pillsy are objecting to the fact that the tweeter didn’t explain a well-known fact that you weren’t aware of:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-political-views/
“U.S. Jews are still a largely Democratic and politically liberal group today, as they have been for decades. Overall, about seven-in-ten identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, including 68% of Jews by religion and 77% of Jews of no religion. Just 26% of U.S. Jews overall identify with the Republican Party or lean toward the GOP.”
The fact that s/he didn’t lay it out for you doesn’t make it antisemitic — you’re just missing some of the background knowledge that the tweeter assumes their audience knows.
And I do find overgeneralization annoying, but people do it all the time about all sorts of different groups without anywhere near this level of intense response. Let’s see all the angry denunciations about associating Christians with fundamentalists, or Blacks with the Democratic party, or any number of other patterns people see.
Second, if you’re going to call something “antisemitic”, shouldn’t the feature being ascribed to Jews be something, you know, insulting? “Oh my god, he said Jews are liberals!!!!” I mean, there are people who are fully supportive of modern American progressivism who are calling this anti-semitic — how can they call this insulting to Jews??? The tweeter’s true target here is not actually “Jews” here, but “liberals”.Report
The idea that Jews are a bunch of revolutionaries who will lead the Forces of Color (TM) and undermine White Christian civilization is a classic anti-Semitic belief from the Right.Report
Well ok… but that’s not what the tweet is saying. I think y’all just started with the idea that it’s antisemitic and are now reaching to find reasons to justify that reaction.Report
I don’t think anything is a third rail, but from my perspective it’s the mental gymnastics to defend it that are telling. The tweet clearly says Jews are responsible for flooding the country with hostile minorities, or at least is singling out Jews as a group for some special responsibility for that and/or especially deserving of the blowback from it. Not liberals. This is the same kind of hairsplitting people do when they say diatribes about white people or whiteness are actually about conservatives, or somehow not really about actual, white people, but rather some extremely negative abstraction they just happen to associate with a racial group. It’s silly and no one buys it as any more than an attempt to get away with saying something people otherwise understand as wrong and offensive.
The pretty weak analysis of actual partisan stances only reinforces this. The racialist woke stuff on the left really only has currency among upper middle class educated white people, who unfortunately tend to be staffers and run activist groups that punch way above their weight in the Democratic coalition. That they do is lamentable but that hardly means that all Democratic voters (or the Jews!) support that specific type of politics, and there are any number of surveys out there that show most of the rank and file does not. There are similar phenomena on the right, where the GOP as a party/the right wing punditry is, say, way more extreme on restricting abortion, or cutting social security than their rank and file voters are.
Point being the only way to defend this, in theory, is to say that the tweeter is really stupid and does not have a very strong understanding of the polity on which he is commenting. Which, I suppose could be true. But for me that’s all just way too cute, and I don’t see why anyone feels the need to go out on a limb for it.Report
OK i guess we may as well stop here — we’re on completely different pages about what is “clear” and what is “gymnastics” and there’s no obvious way to bridge the gap.Report
Fair enough. But maybe in a (vain?) attempt to bridge it anyway I would put out there that we’d all be better off to get away from approaching political issues as a laying down of hard truths for particular races or religions or what have you. I understand there have always been strains of that sort of thing in the US but the goal really should be to avoid it. It almost always generates more heat than light, and even where there is a point to be made there is usually a much better way to do it.Report
OK sure, i’m not actually defending the tweet, just objecting to the intensity of the reaction and the justification used for it. Like, the universe of things I could do that would make my wife made at me includes both not cleaning up my dirty dishes and having an affair, but if I do the former and she reacts as if I had done the latter, then there’s a bigger problem than just my not having taken care of my mess.Report
Well, go back to my first comment where I said if Musk succeeds in destroying twitter, inadvertently or not, he will have done humanity a great service. And if that happens we won’t have to debate the tweet, or the reaction to the tweet, or the reaction to the reaction to the tweet. So see? Common ground after all.Report
I think Ken probably is right, that each camp is reading their expectations into the tweet.
It’s very common for modern debates to fall into “are you evil or stupid”. I understand why you’d be nervous around someone implying that a group of Jews are evil, but the original tweet is really calling them stupid, which is definitely not the stereotype. In my many exchanges with Saul and Lee, I know I’ve accused Saul of commenting in bad faith, but I don’t think I’ve said that about Lee (or at least I don’t see it as a pattern in him). I think he’s just embraced an approach to civil rights issues that’s thoroughly flawed, and over the past half year he’s been examining that. I don’t think either of the bros are stupid, but I think they believe in some stupid things.Report
I have been trying to make the case to Lee that there is a much better way to approach these issues, and that don’t require him to switch sides. Up to him how convincing I’ve been.
My larger point here is just to say that a person is either into this identity stuff or not. The pushback on left wing versions of it is never going to convince anyone if it’s made by people who seem pathologically unable to make their case without running out along the edge (or worse) of exactly what those leftists accuse them of secretly or not so secretly believing.Report
Yeah, I don’t care the color or the reasoning of the Jew-hater. The original tweeter might, and if he does, he’s wrong.Report
So this is what all the fuss is about? I really don’t understand how anyone gets to “antisemitism” from this.
I really don’t see how anyone doesn’t.
You not only have to ignore probable allusions to prevalent anti-semitic conspiracy theories, and language that goes out of its way to be very inclusive (such as “western Jewish populations”), you also have to interpolate a bunch of dubious qualifying assumptions to make it anything but anti-semitic.
Maybe we should grant the benefit of the doubt if we just had to do one of these things, but even if we have a pretty robust prior of “not anti-semitic”, at a certain point the posterior distribution has got to change.Report
Some context for the tweet here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/19/antisemiticism-internet-elon-musk-israel-war/
But Musk plays a uniquely potent role in the drama, disinformation specialists say. His comments amplifying antisemitic tropes to his 163.5 million followers, his dramatic loosening of standards for what can be posted, and his boosting of voices that previously had been banned from the platform formerly known as Twitter all have made antisemitism more acceptable on what is still one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
…
The Israel-Gaza war also has given new life to prominent Holocaust deniers who have proclaimed on X, Telegram and other platforms that the Hamas attacks that left hundreds of Israelis dead were “false flags.” The #Hitlerwasright hashtag, which surged during the 2021 war, has returned, with Memetica, a digital investigations firm, tallying 46,000 uses of the phrase on X since Oct. 7. Previously, the hashtag appeared fewer than 5,000 times per month.Report
“and language that goes out of its way to be very inclusive (such as ‘western Jewish populations’)”
On the contrary, I think “western Jewish populations” is too specific to be considered anti-Semitic.Report
See my responses to InMD — ultimately I suspect we’re just too far apart to have a good discussion.
If you want to try, the question I would ask you is, can you point to specific content in the text itself that qualifies as anti-semitic, leaving aside allusions, references, overtones, etc.?
Or alternatively, can you imagine this or something very similar being said by a Jewish conservative who’s frustrated with his mostly liberal co-religionists? If not, why not?Report
What? Ben’s had a great eye for talent. I’d consider Owens to be the one mistake they’ve made at The Daily Wire.Report
I was thinking back to his time at Breidtbart more than anything.Report
https://today.yougov.com/po…
FWIW, Yougov did a massive online poll on Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Biden’s strongest marks are from Democrats (62 percent approve) and people who sympathize with Israelis and Palestinians equally (53 percent). People who sympathize with Israelis more are basically split with Biden get 47 percent approve, 44 percent disapprove, and 9 percent unsure. Biden’s strongest disapproval comes from Republicans (56 percent) and people who profess to have more sympathy with Palestinians (60 percent).
So Biden once again is probably picking the best path on a contentious policy that is probably the most broadly popular. The people who dislike Biden’s stance are either primed to dislike Biden in general because they are Republicans or just really dislike that many/maybe most Americans are still broadly sympathetic to Israel.Report
The link got cut off. Does the commenting software now truncate raw links?
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47867-bidens-israel-hamas-war-impact-palestinian-democratsReport
No, guess not. What happened with Saul’s comment, then?Report
On the other blog somebody pointed out that a lot of young people are learning that Israel/Palestine is complicated but generally don’t want to do a deeper dive than social media in learning about it. This has apparently led to Osama Bin Laden’s Letter To America being posted on TikTok positively.Report
Tentative ceasefire deal reached in the Israel-Hamas War:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/18/us-israel-hamas-reach-tentative-deal-pause-conflict-free-dozens-hostages/Report
The die-in on the bridge worked!Report
I mean, I think you’re joking, but the article does, somewhat sociopathicly, quote Netanyahu “For international support to continue, humanitarian aid is essential, because of that, we accepted the recommendation to bring fuel into Gaza.”
Does Netanyahu even hear himself? ‘We are only allowing humanitarian aid because we feel it looks too bad for us not to, which would mean other people wouldn’t support us as much.’
Anyway, so, this ceasefire is explicitly due to outside pressure, probably Biden’s and the EU.
And whether the die-ins did it, or just the poll numbers, or maybe Biden wanted it anyway, is unknown, but maybe we should try to not be cynical about this for once?
The US public applied political pressure to the US government, demanding that the US government apply political pressure to Israel, and it appears, as for as we can tell, they actually got a result! It all worked! It’s almost a miracle, honestly.
(We’re going to learn in like a year that what actually happened is a few major donors that had pushed for pro-Israel positions suddenly got cold feet about the deaths and reversed positions and it had nothing to do with public pressure, aren’t we? Dammit, I almost managed to not be cynical here.)Report
I’m sure you’ve seen this story:
I took the liberty of adding emphasis.Report
“Look, I know that you think the IDF laying siege to our hospitals looks bad, but I need to inject some vital context here and tell you they also tried to give us fuel, and we said, ‘No.'”
It would be funny if it weren’t for literally everything about it.Report
“he important thing is to make Israel and by extension all Jews look like the most evil people in the world no matter what. This is the thought process.Report